Re: Time to deprecate crash dump support in stats tools (or KVM-grovelers in general)?

[Simon Burge <simonb%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

David Holland wrote:

> For debugging, I think what's wanted is one tool that reads the
> complete sysctl/kernfs/*ctl/whatnot tree from a crash dump, and set up
> tools like netstat to be able to read from that. Or maybe even create
> a wedge in the libc sysctl interface for it. This would allow almost
> anything that can be done now, only more reliably.

The problem with this is that a number of sysctl's aren't just "read"
from the kernel - the kernel does some amount of work to build the reply
first then copies the results out to userland.  Common examples are
things that follow linked lists in the kernel, but then present a nice
simple array (often nice 64-bit alignment friendly structures instead of
"raw" structures used in the original data) to userland.

Cheers,
Simon.